In 2020, the MQ Libelle – ceremoniously opened atop the Leopold Museum – marked the first architectural expansion of Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier (MQ). Together with the adjacent terrace landscape, the MQ Libelle constitutes a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk conceived by the renowned Austrian artists Brigitte Kowanz and Eva Schlegel, in collaboration with the architectural firm Ortner & Ortner.
From the outset, the architects – who had already realized the Leopold Museum and the mumok Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna in the late 1990s – envisioned the MQ Libelle as a futuristic platform, seemingly floating above the courtyard of the cultural complex. Starting in the late 2000s, Ortner & Ortner explored this idea through a series of spatial studies and autonomous visual works, which now form the basis of the Leopold Museum’s Focus Exhibition.
Presented in the museum’s Print Room, the exhibition traces the artistic genesis of Laurids and Manfred Ortner’s vision for the MQ Libelle, whose conceptual roots can be found in the utopian architectural experiments of Haus-Rucker-Co in the 1970s and 1980s. The artworks designed specifically for the roof of the MQ Libelle – Brigitte Kowanz’s Light Circles and Eva Schlegel’s veiled – resonate with new site-specific interventions by the artists in the museum’s Upper Atrium, on view in Austria for the first time.
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